


Flophouse

by retroco



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Eventual Romance, F/F, F/M, Learning How To Be, Mental Health Issues, Multiple Relationships, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, perfectionist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-02-06 19:45:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12824751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/retroco/pseuds/retroco
Summary: A sad, strict overachiever is forced into farm life, and it feels like the end of her world, a complete implosion of her identity. Mel wants to fix her headspace, make the best of an unlikely and unfortunate situation and repair her relationships, but she's a chronic isolationist who dreads meeting people and breaking out of her comfortable routine.Love is not on her agenda and she doubts it'll ever come up, until it does, quietly, fearfully, and unexpectedly.





	1. Run and Hide

Sometimes he would take Mel beyond the fields to the murky and smelly little lake, where she would amble among the clots of washed-up algae looking for beached snails and pretty rocks. The water was perpetually cold and dark. Rarely, she would hear the slap of a large fish’s tail on the water as it broke the surface. Her grandpa told her it was a sea monster, but only a little one. (There was a dusty snail shell on a dilapidated desk inside the shack, turned almost transparent with time.)  
On an obligatory visit in the autumn, during a nasty spat between her parents in the city, they had gone fishing on the quaint sea, in rowboat almost lost to the years even then. It had been windy, and Mel could see a rolling carpet of abysmally grey clouds on the horizon, untransmutable into any animal, any whimsical shape. She had been very cold and bored, and as the pier slowly disappeared as Grandpa rowed, a great anxiety coiled more and more tightly within her. Water began to splash over the sides of the boat as they rocked. A small bucket with a faded advertisement for a bait shop was thrust into her little raw-red hands. She bailed out the water spurred on by her grandpa’s shouts and curses. Nothing was caught that day, though Grandpa stewed in his foul mood the entire night, much as the rainstorm gathered overhead and hung low before releasing its own tirade. She hid in the dingy little guest room after, and carved tiny drawings and letters into the wooden paneling with her bitten fingernails, listening to the cold rain on the little window, to him talk to no one in the next room. 

A winter vacation far in the past- a hike in the snowy woods, supernaturally quiet save for the wind rattling the last few brittle, tenacious leaves. Cheap instant hot chocolate in a battered thermos that had leaked onto her puffy pink coat. Mel had been amazed at her grandpa feeding the birds right out of his gnarled and weathered old hands, how they would perch and peck at the seed he held, how clear the wingbeats sounded as they sprang from his hands back into the thicket. Later, as the sky had reddened, she watched as a black vole leapt from one of her footprint and scrabbled across the layer of crunchy ice on top of the snow before disappearing again. She wished sometimes that she were small like that, able to find a safe, warm little den wherever she went, no matter what happened. 

And now she was the proprietress of her grandfather’s patch of stinking, stagnant water, the same land of dubious quality covered in wilderness gone unchecked, logs and weeds rotting in the cold spring rain. She hadn’t been there in fifteen years. Some of the recollections she had of this place she never thought about, out of fear or some unknown twisting, crushing pain felt chiefly in her throat.  
She listened to the water on her hood, felt the damp and furry quarter in her pocket, turning endlessly through her sweaty fingers. The sky was colourless, the clouds without breaks. A solid wall. The rain wouldn’t stop for a long time. There were drops on her eyelashes running into her eyes as she blinked.  
There was a woman by her side, overbearing, with a very firm grasp on her elbow, trying to sell her, with a familiarly cramped businesswoman’s smile, some home renovations she could never afford. An old man with a soft face that looked like it would droop entirely off if he got too upset stood stooped on the porch in a very old-fashioned long raincoat and cap. He was quite bad at sticking with his welcoming façade, and as his little speech went on it dulled, and then dropped entirely. Mel knew her grandpa had been about as popular here as with the fragmented family that had ceased contact with him back home.  
“With a little hard work…. A little elbow grease…. A bit of gumption….” The mayor repeated endlessly.  
She made some eye contact, but hadn’t been listening at all, just watching the faces and hiding within herself making cheap prayers that the odd pair would leave quickly.  
Mel thanked them absently, and they left with their halfway-there smiles.  
The shack in which her crumbling old memories of her grandfather had been only repaired to the extent that the floor would not give way as she stepped in. there was a solid door on the outside, but on the inside the screen door hung on a single hinge, full of large tears.  
One of the windows was long since broken, but recently sealed in plastic; the curled corpse of a lone spider trapped inside, web still intact. The sill was crumbling from water damage and mold; a large chunk of the remaining peeling paint came away easily at her touch.  
There was room for her small, creaking bed, and enough storage for most of her boxes save for two, of superfluous kitchen tools (a cheap expresso machine bought at an excellent sale on a whim and never used, ancient pottery from some dead relative depicting cheerful, ruddy-faced children frolicking with farm animals in gaily painted porcelain).  
It felt like some sort of bizarre nightmare, for her entire life and all its modest, realistic, achievable plans to be upended like this. Mel had stepped in a mud puddle on the way in; she had broken its thin crust of ice and soaked her good jeans in filthy water halfway up her calf. She was glad for the fallback option, the lack of rent, but was beginning to hate the place again despite the forceful and artificial sheen of positivity she had cultivated, alone in the drafty farmhouse.  
She had been paradoxically happy at her desk job at Joja; it was like an old childhood game of pretend, something comforting and warm in her mind come to reality. The opportunity to don real actual business casual and grownups’ silky pantyhose and sensible heels, to earn a living on one’s own in a predictable pattern. She missed her lineup of dead and rotting houseplants, ill-thought but well-meaning gifts after a couple of lengthy bouts of flu, et cetera. The pictures of her old cat, the pretty frame that still had the stock photo of the happy couple with grinning, drooling toddler inside.  
Job security. A place of her very own, admittedly with a less-than-ideal roommate with a disruptive lifestyle but not so bad that she could call for eviction, cold beer, making regular payments on her bills and debts and feeling so functional, so efficient at her mechanical little routine. 

It was no more than a sticky-cheap and dirty bandage on the superiority complex she had nursed for years at the top of her classes at the little poorly funded high school in her district, which had been broken quickly and easily by the hands of her peers in college. Each special, each a standout overachiever and wonderkid in their own right now ordered in a rigid hierarchy of pure achievement.  
To get hired full-time with room for advancement at a large and famous company straight out of college was a pure dream, which had come unbelievably true the summer after her graduation. That was the best it ever got; of this she had been assured all her life by family and friends and firmly believed so herself.  
And when the inevitable happened, the frightening rumor that she assured herself couldn’t possibly happen occurred, it shook her to her bones. Joja started at the bottom of the corporate ladder for cost-saving layoffs and she had been another casual fatality, out on her ass with those bills and debts over which she had once felt so in control looming over her threateningly. No severance, no nothing. A partial paycheck, not even a goodbye from the few work friends she had made over the years who eyed her quietly as she took her small box of dead, dry plants with both great relief and contemptuous pity. 

She launched immediately into a job hunt, sure that her paltry savings weren’t going to cut it for rent much longer, but there seemed to be an overabundance of fresh meat on the market and there was nothing save degrading part-time retail work. Mel had been through the works in high school, college, and pre-Joja, and had vowed never to return.  
But the work tied her over for two a month and ended mostly in firings, the most memorable of which was her dismissal over a loud spat with a customer staining a dress with coffee and insisting a discount be applied, ending in a very public and embarrassing panic attack. The savings went dry fast supplementing the shitty service-industry pay.

Finally, at wits’ end, she visited her mother on a damp night at the end of a very mild winter. She was a stout, red-faced woman with a penchant for tropical fish, travel, and exotically rich men. Her looks, a misty sort of revenant beauty visible in full only in a certain light and angle, had faded long ago but she still retained the mysterious quality that drew men to her as if by magnetism.  
This trait was more desirable to Mel as an adult, unlucky in love, than it had been as a bewildered child, unable to understand or accept fully that there was no love in the tenuous marriage her mother maintained for a time with a rather well-off man who was not her biological father and who took every opportunity to remind her of it.  
She could not understand why Momma had male guests over all the time, that smelled of spice or sea or sometimes just sweat, why she took them in the spare guest room when Dad wasn’t there and screamed at them in no language she had ever heard.  
Somewhat of a dinosaur with that artifact of the past, free love, still alive and well in her heart, her mother appeared at the nondescript door of her condo in an atrocious flowered muumuu and silk scarf.  
Her apartment was lit almost totally by the otherworldly, wavering fluorescents of her fish-tank lights, lending a feel of creepy unreality to the rooms. Tacky little seashell knick-knacks and dolls from her travels were the sole genre of decor along with masses of scented candles; the furniture was leather so used that it had no discernible colour. Perhaps it had been white once, maybe a buff tan. 

They sat at the too-large dining table to discuss their business, accompanied by the peaceful bubbling of the aquariums, old ceviche (one-hundred-percent chance of food poisoning), and an old folder chock-full of family matters that were totally irrelevant at best and potentially painful at worst to her mother. It was covered with anonymous stains and bloated with too much information; an old polaroid slipped out and floated across the table. Mel turned it over to inspect it, expecting a rare fond memory.  
It was a lurid portrait of her mother, red-eyed and looking away from the camera, sitting supinely upon a unmade, tacky bedspread in a cheap beach hotel, clad scantily in beaded bra and thong and cheap rhinestone belly piercing. Her arms folded behind her head so that her modest bust was thrust forward.  
Looking at the date, Mel guessed that it was taken when her mother was not so much older than she. She swallowed hard in embarrassment and passed it wordlessly to her mother, who suppressed a girlish giggle and slipped it in one of the large pockets of her dress. 

"Sorry, dear, I’ve gotten all my important documents mixed up.”

Mel noticed a huge wad of the little pictures in the family documents folder, and despite herself held a secret seed within her of admiration for her mother’s complete lack of self-consciousness. She could feel the seat bead on her upper lip as the night wore on and she became more uncomfortable with her mother’s stories as they emerged along with some of the more PG snapshots. There were extremely few pictures of her in childhood, even less of the man she had called her father.  
Her mother in a sunny wet t-shirt contest, first place medal, with huge teased-up hair dampened like wet cotton candy.  
Her mother, blurry and young and much slimmer, bronzed and napping on the beach with a crude message written in sunscreen on her back, swimsuit undone.  
Her mother with endless bland men, some women, plenty of alcohol.  
All thrilling social adventures, all good experiences and lucky mishaps as if her mother was unable to relate anything but the positive aspects of her memories. 

A larger picture of her balding grandfather, younger than she had ever known him, squinting and smiling in the bright sun, wearing an old-fashioned bathing costume at some beach. Mel showed her mom, whose smile degraded into a thin, tight line. This picture too was swept into her pockets.  
Eventually the proper documents were found, explained rather poorly by her red-faced, tittering mom, already into the tequila, who offered pina coladas and a night of home videotapes at the end of Mel’s visit. Though a loose-lipped drunk, she spoke almost nothing except for what was strictly necessary to the documents about her own father. Nothing of the town. There was a yellowed envelope, torn open ages ago, addressed to Mel on the table in cursive too fancy to be practical. This too was claimed by her mother’s meaty hands, accompanied by an incoherent excuse. Mel let it slide, used to it.  
On her way out, she spied a tall, boxy man with slicked-back grey hair and a meagre but styled moustache on the stairs. His cologne, an especially powerful witch’s brew of spice and musk and god only knew what else, arrived well before him, and she knew he was bound for her mother’s apartment.  
Mel drew up the hood of her raincoat and slipped past, muffling a cough with her sleeve, exhausted by the force of her mother’s flippant exuberance. 

In the coziness of her own place, her roommate gone out for the night undoubtedly to someone’s wild party, she composed an overly-formal email to the mayor of the little town listed in the documents and googled farming techniques and business strategies late into the night, listening to the steady rain against the windows.


	2. Old and Older

In her first week in the little shack she had made several strange discoveries in her quest to clean up, relics of her grandpa’s and the leavings of nature- a complete, bleached raccoon skeleton in the corner of the yard, several ruined buildings, a length of rope recently deposited under a tree, and a beloved childhood plaything (Buddy the All-Seeing Eye Dog) abandoned in a closet full of cobwebs in the hall. 

Mel put him in a place of honor on her bed, and though he stunk like mold and mothballs and decay, he retained all his fetching qualities: the one missing button eye, the frayed ribbon around his rigid stuffed tail, the liquid chamber within him sloshing with a plastic ball that would show an uncanny fortune if he was hugged or shaken. The torn ear which she had performed a shoddy emergency surgery on one bland, hot summer day had come completely free from the childish, unskilled stitches and was nowhere to be found. His internal speaker was functional, but only spouted a dystopian robot dialect of mixed scream and static.

It rained for days and then for weeks. The little house was constantly damp and rarely saw the sun to dry it or warm it up. Mel had no desire to go outside, and didn’t. Having mostly city knowledge, she could make a proper fire in the brick fireplace about once every ten tries, and sat in a rat’s nest of quilts and knitted throws, watching and then rewatching old movies on the ancient VCR the mayor had handed off to her during the move-in. 

She had talked to only a handful of townspeople; she had no friends there or back home owing to her strict policy of constant professionalism and unintentional isolation. Mel decided it would be a bit much to try to forge a social life so soon, especially in her state of mind. She had nothing to say, nothing to sell, and nothing to give, not even small talk. Buddy kept her company, screeching when she sat on him accidentally, offering a fortune when she pulled him out from under her ass. 

Answer the door when opportunity knocks

Directness breeds good opportunities

One good friend is worth more than a million dollars

She hugged him again, not for his contradictory fortune-cookie wisdom but out of a sudden well in her heart of real childlike love.  
The shadows in the room changed slowly, and when she looked up, the rain had stopped.  
It had been a dismal beginning to spring. The farm was a complete bog, and the trees had barely broken their dormancy. It was the first time she’d been warm since moving into the shitty farm, and she unzipped and then shed her windbreaker and felt the mild sun on her skin and the wind’s fingers in the frizzy mat of her dark hair.  
The parsnip seeds she had thrown on the ground and covered with mud as a good luck charm had sprouted, then washed away in the rain or simply rotted in place, save for one. It had a few sickly leaves, a few rotten ones, but a fine-looking root, though it had grown in a bizarre zigzag in the stony soil.  
She wiped the mud with her sleeve and held it to the sun as if to prove it was real, that it had happened heedless of her and her cloud of dark thoughts that seemed to govern her mind and therefore her whole world. A little bit of hope broke through as she breathed in deeply the fresh air of the spring, with its cleansing muddy scent of new life, new beginnings.  
She twisted off the leaves, left it in what the mayor had called the shipping bin, and gone to wash up. 

Mel had things to do in town. 

 

A while later, smelling of her drugstore-cheap miscellaneous flower shampoo from her old home, she set out on the mucky packed-earth path to town, slipping once on the grass amid the recent and older footprints despite her heavy workboots. 

She passed what was once a bus stop, with some twisted, forgotten old signs rimmed in rust and a more modern-looking ticket machine with an interface covered by a paper sign that almost-illegibly informed all that it was out of order in bold black ink that ran down the page in a rainbow. The whole little scene, in which she felt as though something would come from the tall grasses and attack her, was contained in an abandoned lot, with cracked paving and weeds aplenty.  
Mel slogged on and reached cobblestone, then civilisation.  
A tiny town square with a few shops lined up. A series of sopping wet raised gardens, the little transplants bogged down in place, having not yet filled out enough to look good. A couple of benches beginning to dry patchily in the sun. 

A couple of girls sat next to each other on the wettest bench, as though they had come outdoors as soon as the rain stopped. Mel sat on a bench near them, trying to look busy and uninterested while committing the faces to memory.  
A plain girl, bony with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes, of an undeterminable age and a shorter, softer bespectacled girl with a bob, dark complexion and indignant countenance, as if she could debate a person about anything and win, and was always prepared to do just that.  
Mel didn’t want to be rude and cut in, but they had already lowered their voices to a conspiratorial tone and sat closely in almost a huddle, casting glances at her. 

“Hi.”

They stopped and turned then, maybe a bit surprised that Mel had spoken to them.

“You must be the new farmer. Welcome to town.” The bony one offered, a safe and conservatively friendly sort of greeting, but spoken with a certain reserved coolness, enough to show the town welcomed her, but not them in particular. Not yet. 

They introduced themselves as Penny and Maru, then got up and went their separate ways, both with noticeable wet patches on their rears from the bench.  
Mel left too, went to the general store she had passed earlier. It was cramped inside, shelves stuffed with as much product as could be displayed at once. Sales posters and seed ads were taped to the cash and the wall behind it, some sad and faded from a bygone era, halfway to being legitimate antiques.  
There was absolutely nothing modern about the store or any of its wares. Sundries, seeds, some samples of a hideous and outdated carpet and matching wallpaper that hadn’t been offered on city shelves in two decades. She bought a couple packets of seeds, hyperaware of her funds as she checked out. 

The cashier at the counter was at least fifty, lank and sweating, with a conspicuous upper lip as though he had maintained a mustache for years and had only recently shaved it. The glasses he wore did nothing to soften his sharp eyes. He rang her up, making chattering small talk that resonated in the tiny shop as he wrote her receipt by hand. He was Pierre himself, owner of Pierre’s General Store, he proclaimed proudly. He offered to buy whatever fresh produce she could bring along with her, and made sure to slip in an advertisement for the sad-looking lumpy pack by the cash register as she left with her purchases in a brown paper bag.  
It was much more spacious than her meager, threadbare old backpack, and at a steal of a price, Pierre assured her retreating back as she turned the doorknob.

That was more than enough of the town for Mel to have an opinion about it. A cramped place, full of common gossips, where everyone knew everyone else and their private business and were much too invested in it. Where they didn’t exactly take kindly to newcomers. She felt not completely unwelcome based on the few people she had talked to, but more accurately like she stood out in the wrong way, and it was going to take a very long time for her to develop the kind of puzzle-piece curves and edges in her personality that would allow her to fit in comfortably with the village folk. 

As she made her way through the footprints in the mud in the red sunset, she noticed a girl with neon purple hair in a bulky hoodie pass her by, watched the obvious and unbidden emotions play out on her face in an instant. Wide-eyed shock and then, almost bumping shoulders as Mel avoided a large rock in her path, a wide smirk of contempt. Mel, confused, looked after her, but the girl did not turn back, her hands and pants coated in mud and filth.  
Creeped out, she knew the girl had been coming to town from her farm, and picked up the pace to see what was stolen, out of place, broken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one is kind of short, sorry. would appreciate any kudos or comments/feedback of course. i guess we're going to be digging into the drama pretty soon.


	3. Get Out

At the house in the twilight dark with her eyes straining, Mel did a quick examination of her little cabin. Many new footprints in the mud, a tear in the plastic covering of the window in her bedroom from a dull knife, perhaps. A scattered pile of stones near her front door. A neon pink symbol spray painted onto some pines. The raccoon skeleton was gone entirely. 

Mel was spooked to know that there had been people on her property while she was out. What if they were still there? It was teenage-vandal level work, but what if they had some inclination to stick around and hurt her later? As far as she knew there wasn’t anything like a police service out this far in the boonies. Sweat trickled down her back, soaking through her shirt. 

It was fully black out, and the wind had picked up and sang through the trees. Night animals emerged and came calling through the brush, stirring the undergrowth, setting her further on edge until she was grinding her teeth and had to remind herself to stop.  
There was a well of deep weariness beneath her hot, sharp anxiety. There was no other viable option except to just turn in and size it up again in the morning, when everything was still. 

The hole in the window dropped the temperature of her room by several degrees, and she listened to the sucking sound of the wind as sleep wavered out of her grasp. Mel listened for human sounds. intruders, lying tense in her bed, but the rain had started up again in the night and drowned out all other sound.

The morning brought an artist’s palate of grays and blacks. The water drummed on the roof and her room was icy. Her feet were red and numb from cold, peeking out from under her fortress of covers. Something broke Mel from her false rest; she had the feeling she had only been hanging between consciousnesses all night.  
The sensation that she hadn’t slept at all hung in the front of her brain and in her eyelids, which felt as though they had been removed and replaced with lead. Her anxiety was dull and equally heavy in her chest, and she kicked her quilts onto the grimy floor and stood, filled with a strange frenetic energy. Like she had been reanimated from a corpse, it buzzed uncomfortably under the heavy weariness of her body and mind. 

She lumbered into the bathroom, not bothering with shutting the door and stripped in front of the mirror, assessing herself. Too pouchy in the belly and legs, arms and chest that reminded her of a raw chicken, scrawny and sallow. Her hair limp and oily and her face bleary-red and visibly weighed down from stress, dark eyes heavy-lidded under thick brows. Her own self in the mirror, staring back at her, looking defeated and downtrodden and Mel resisted the urge to talk herself worse.   
Her mother had told her extensively about taking care of herself, the only concrete life lesson she had ever taught Mel, about how what she had was the only body she’d ever have, about how image was important to women. Outdated stereotypes about makeup and grooming that were more relics of a past in which the only thing she had ever done was take care of herself, tend to her own needs.  
A selfish, hedonistic homewrecker and yet a free and independent spirit that took pleasure and pride in herself. Depending on her mood, her mom was one or the other. Mel had never known how to reconcile her mother into a combination of the two, though she knew that to be the truth about all people, that they were a blend of good and bad and ugly. 

Mel got into the old shower to quell her shivers. Under the lukewarm and slightly off-colour spray she forgot about herself and stood scraping mold from the tile grout with a fingernail, totally absent from reality until the hot water ran out and sent her stumbling back into the tiny, dim bathroom. 

Mel fixed some toast (butter and jelly only, never peanut butter), found she was low on food and creature comforts. Having passed the saloon the day before, she thought of cold beer, perhaps a fireplace, perhaps company who were drunk enough to bring her into the social fold. Heart in her chest, she waited for the rain to let up and let her database of imagined scenarios rise unbidden into her unoccupied mind. They nagged at her, building a vice-grip of tension in her until she forced herself to work for a bit, actual physical stuff, grabbing the heavy tools from their place leaning in a jumble against the wall. She slipped her pocketknife in her bag just in case.  
The house seemed to be fine except for the one unfortunate window, and besides, the rain had reformed the mud and blurred the footprints to nonexistence. Everything felt bigger and so much worse at night. She felt distinctly foolish for being up so late with her ears perked up like some kind of watchdog.   
It was more cathartic than she cared to admit, digging stones out of her field. Though it was mucky, filthy work, and difficult to boot, the earth she disturbed smelled of life and rain and worms. Mel remembered once loving the smell of the wet soil, the thrill of lifting a rock to find a colony of pillbugs, perhaps some stolid worms, writhing guts-pink in the sudden air.  
Thoroughly soiled and chilled, she went back inside. Only a couple hours had passed but Mel could feel a more physical exhaustion that overshadowed the nervous energy in her mind. She found a cooking show on the local station and bundled up in fresh jeans and an old sweater for a nap.   
It had been almost seven before she had plucked up enough courage to go to the bar. Her knife stayed in her jacket pocket, and she had consulted Buddy about the night, for safety.   
She had to broadly interpret the fortune he delivered, for the plastic dodecahedron inside of him had gotten stuck and came up on the edge of two distinctly opposite readings, ‘NO’ and ‘Money finds those who are humble’. Mel had to shake him a couple times to dislodge the plastic shape in its purple ichor. She guessed the real fortune was that she sometimes had to do things herself to get results. 

The saloon was cozier than Mel had thought, with tables and chairs in intimate nooks, beer and conversation flowing freely through the warm air.  
A girl with shocking-blue hair waved her down from behind the bar, and introduced herself as Emily in a sprightly voice. 

“You’re the new farmer, huh? First drink’s on me, then!” 

Mel mumbled her introductions. Somehow, Emily’s intense brightness made her self-conscious, and she avoided meeting her eyes as though she had the power to see just how substandard Mel was, standing at the end of the bar in her muddy boots and old flowered raincoat. She killed the conversation quick with a halfhearted smile and a promise to see Emily around.   
She was close (but not too close, she hoped fervently) to some guy. He leaned in the darkest corner of the room, squarish face unshaven, unwashed and full of vitriol, and gave her a hard, sarcastically skeptical look when she smiled at his direction shakily. 

Mel knew a bad thing when she saw one, turned on her heel, drink in hand, and went to greet Louis out of an awkward sense of obligation. They spoke briefly about the rain and crops and her grandfather, remembered here in a curiously fond light, even though she had recalled him primarily being an ill-tempered bastard.   
She tended to drink quickly, and as such, was more than tipsy when a group of the villagers picked up on the new face and went to introduce themselves, which happened in a rush, all at once. The booze made her much more open, she thought, more able to smile and laugh, though Mel still couldn’t meet their eyes for an extended period of time and would probably forget their faces, only transient in her muddled mind.

Another drink came and went in the warm company of the people’s shitty jokes. They couldn’t believe the stories Mel told about big city life and she couldn’t stop giggling, though she tried to control her volume. Her face was warm, and she had to pee.   
The direction of the washroom was pointed out vaguely by someone drunker than her, with brown or perhaps blonde hair. Mel walked past the bar with her head up and her back straight, worries shoved aside, waving in Emily’s direction with synthetic giddiness. She got a toothy beam from Emily and a sneer from the guy in the corner. Prick. 

Wheeling on down a dim hallway, thinking about funny bugs in her woodwork at home and more such tickly nonsense, she spotted lights, and then chairs, and then a large pool table. Mel used to dream of being a pool player, of being a chain smoking sexy teen delinquent back in the day, hanging all night in a retro arcade from decades past. There was a game in progress with people bent over the green fuzz, concentrating.  
Two young-looking guys halted the game to look at her, while the third occupant, a smallish girl laying sideways over a leather armchair continued her ministrations on her phone, unbothered.   
An ugly old tiffany lamp hung low over the table, furred with dust inside and painting colour on the walls in light.   
Mel’s dreamy reverie was lost in the lights and her speech halted by having interrupted a clearly private gathering, something she made sure to never do.   
The girl in the armchair gazed up. She had the brightest purple hair Mel had ever seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one felt really forced to write and if it reads that way i apologize. I'm not all that motivated to write and I've been eating myself alive with stress. Was originally planning to ditch this for now, since there's not been a whole lot of action in the story or the reception, but I'm gonna press on, just for shits. 
> 
> yeah. I don't have a particular update schedule but hey.   
> Comments and kudos would be really really appreciated. Thanks to all who have left their mark on this already, love you.


	4. Okay

The girl in the chair looked up, unbothered, and stared openly at Mel, at her ratty work jeans and wild hair. Time seemed frozen, the men passing a look between them as if deciding what to say. One of them, a young-looking kid with comically spiked blond hair and a puppyish openness to his countenance straightened suddenly, pool cue at his side like a knight’s lance.  
He hit his head on the lamp and gave a grunt, eliciting a snort from his companion. The coloured light swayed hypnotically, and Mel felt as if she was in a different dimension, within a kaleidoscope and populated by strange alien creatures. Was she alien here, or human? Her head swam, and her tongue was thick and heavy in her mouth. Her hands tingled.

“Uh, hey.” The kid piped up, rubbing the bump on his head. He seemed taller than he appeared initially, and had a prominent Adam’s apple on a skinny neck.  
Mel tried to smile, lost in the lights and drinks, but it came out as a panicked grimace. A bead of sweat trailed down her back. 

“Did you, um, need something? You look lost.” He smiled hesitantly back with charmingly crooked teeth.

“Uhhhhh.” Said Mel. She stretched out the word around the lump in her throat, having lost her train of thought and unable to remember why she had come down the hall in the first place.  
The other man, whose back had been turned, pocketed the 3rd ball, placed his cue on the table and faced her. He gave her a disinterested once-over and lowered his gaze to the wobbling rainbow on the floor. He was an inch shorter than his friend, dark haired, with unreadable eyes that were the kind of liquid black that had made Mel shiver inside back in college. The kind of eyes that she was specifically wary of, having made many mistakes in her youth because of them. 

“Oh shit, man,” The blond said, glancing back. “What the hell?”

Mel took their distraction as an opportunity and turned on her heel out of the room and down the hall. Her knees were shaking, and she let a sweaty palm trail along the wood paneling on the wall, feeling the grooves. 

“Well, that was weird!” a female voice issued loudly behind her. She paused, listening beyond the background chatter of the bar for replies, but the deep responses were muffled too badly to understand. 

Well, yes, it WAS weird. It was always going to be weird. She was what was weird here.  
The cold, dim hall ended in a large room filled with kegs and bottles. A storeroom. Mel turned again, nervous now, urged on by her bladder.  
She passed the warm room once more, stepping into the rectangle of light spilling into the corridor. 

“Do you know where the washroom is?” 

She got it all out in one too-fast burst, and though the game was halted again, only the man in the black hoodie turned to respond. The girl was once more on her phone, carrying on a conversation with the blond, who was half-listening while trying to position his cue just so. 

“There aren’t any bathrooms in this place.” He said, hands in his pockets. His face seemed more arranged this time to appear neutral

“Oh. Thanks.” Mel stood for a second more, her face burning and nodded, lifting a shaky hand as she turned. Her heart beat ecstatically in her chest and head at once. She rushed out the door of the saloon without saying goodbye to any of her new alcohol-induced friends. 

Exhausted but somehow feeling renewed standing in the cool wind, she checked her surroundings, listened, watched for a while before stumbling behind the trash can to squat. It was only just past 9:30, and the entire town was silent and dark. There were no lights save for the tavern’s, and as she buttoned up her jeans she looked up at the endless stairs and the generous curve of the moon, the same colour as bleached bone, not full but almost there. What was that called?  
G-something. Geb…. Gebbis maybe?  
It was a beautiful night and for once she was not lost within herself, her frenetic mind quelled by alcohol. The little event in the pool room combined with her new name for the phase of the moon seemed really rather hilarious and Mel stood and laughed at herself until there were tears in her eyes.

She woke up in a sweat the next morning with a slight headache and her blankets all over the floor. Her body felt leaden and stiff, but she felt somehow light inside, having only fuzzy, warm memories without detail from the night before. Mel didn’t quite remember the walk home, but after a customary check for wallet and phone, she decided all was well and sauntered off in her underwear for water and an aspirin.  
She did not look in the mirror before her shower, though skipping the bad habit made her anxious, and willed herself not to look as she brushed her teeth afterwards.  
It was the first really warm day of that spring, and Mel spent the day properly for once, working on clearing her land and tending seedlings. 

She took a hike around her property, stepping over fallen logs already blooming with bright moss and boulders furred with blue lichens. A train sounded once, distantly.  
Once she was out of view of her little house, it was altogether a different world in the woods. She smelled the rawness of the earth, the scent of new plants birthed from soil made from generations of decay and regeneration. The smell of pure water and light and darkness, energy and constant, undisturbed growth. Birds called to each other in the trees, and a ladybug landed on her hand.  
Mel felt incredibly small then, even smaller than usual amid the busyness of the earth and the huge trees. She hadn’t been in a forest like this since she was a little girl, guided by her grandpa, who would point out everything that could be used or eaten from the woods. She had been utterly bored, muddy and tired, and had turned her nose up at the foraged meal he’d cooked for dinner that night. The memory made her breath catch in her throat with a well of guilt for the brat she’d been.  
There was a tiny patch of the first wildflowers of the season, stretching delicately, frailly, for the light from the base of a tree, gently purple and somehow magical. She plucked a few on a childish urge, then felt ashamed of it, carrying them limply in her fist. 

Well past three o’clock and several hours into her little exploration, she came across an old stone structure a little shorter than she was, made of what looked like crudely shaped limestone. It was covered in moss and old, dead leaves, and she swept the debris onto the forest floor. There was her grandfather’s name, inscribed on a large flat rock sitting on the surface of the little shrine, alone for a mile in every direction in the gentle sunlight. Mel stopped and watched specks and motes dance slowly in the sunbeams, and felt oddly unnerved and at peace at the same time, as though there was a different force at work in that area, not present anywhere else in the valley.  
Though her memories conflicted with the villagers’ tales of a kindly and outgoing man, and that she knew her grandfather had been buried in the city somewhere, Mel laid the crumpled flowers in front of the stone.  
Unsure of what to do, she turned and went back the way she came, praying there were no beasts or ghosts or anything in the woods watching her.  
A twig snapped. A chipmunk sat on a rotting log holding some nut or seed in its tiny paws, and gave her along look before skittering off.  
A path lead in a different direction; Mel decided to take it. It looked recently used and her concerns about trespassers were still fresh in her mind. She had begun to sweat in her windbreaker and unzipped it, the sound loud in the quietude of the forest. She heard the train again, much louder, and wondered where the tracks were.  
The path led into a clearing with a couple of rotting wooded steps leading up a fairly steep incline, and she kept on until dusk fell, until she was having trouble making out her surroundings, and even then until she saw light in the distance.

There was a large house nestled in the hills, wooden like most every other house in the valley, with yellow light pouring from the windows. The porch light was on, and a little sign by the yard advertised carpentry services. Robin’s, it said. Mel didn’t remember the woman’s face, only her bright red hair.  
There had been no sign of anyone of the path besides the fresh footprints. Mel had been secretly squeezed inside imagining a confrontation, and only then noticed how tightly she had been holding her shoulders. She relaxed and realized that she hadn’t eaten, and that she was exhausted down to her core. 

She skirted around the front yard and found a rock near a lake to sit on not far from the light. All in all, it had been a very good day for her. She had gotten almost nothing done, less than an hour of actual farm work and felt guilty for it, but had managed to keep the events of the night before almost entirely from her mind. But the most important thing was that she had gotten something done, an old therapist’s constant mantra that she chanted to herself habitually but never quite believed. The stargazer munched on a granola bar she had tossed in her bag and chugged down half of her water bottle.

Mel leaned back and looked at the sky. The gibbous moon had metamorphosed into a full moon and risen above the treeline, bright enough to see every dent and scratch in it. She tilted her head and looked for the lucky rabbit imprinted on it, from an old story her mother had told her, picked up from her travels.  
Mel caught a whiff of cigarette smoke on the night air. A cheapish brand, the exact kind one of her mother’s worst boyfriends had smoked. Tension coiled in her again as she swiveled around, looking for the source.  
The stranger from the bar with the dark eyes was leaning against her rock, blowing a stream of smoke up at the moon. Mel gasped sharply. She hadn’t heard him approach, or else hadn’t seen him there when she arrived. He turned and looked at her, taking another slow drag. She wrapped her arms around her knees instinctively. 

“Uh, I’m sorry- I can leave if- if I’m bothering you… “  
“No- no, it’s fine.” He responded, more kindly than she was expecting.  
His hood was up, but she could see several cowlicks of dark hair poking out in profile. They were silent, Mel watching the stars for some kind of comforting sign, certain that the invisible burn on her skin was from his eyes. She looked at him again. He was staring out across the pond, paying her absolutely no mind.  
“I’m the new farmer, y’know. I… I dunno if you’ve heard. My name is Mel.”  
She put the words out as though addressing nobody, not expecting him to be listening. She unfolded herself and let her bootheels thud against the stone as she swung her sore legs back and forth.  
It took him so long to respond that she wasn’t sure he’d heard her, but after a while he let out a long, smoky exhale, ground out the stub of his cigarette into the grass and turned to her.  
“I’ve heard plenty about you. From Robin, my…. mom. I’m Sebastian.”  
She held his eyes for a couple seconds, acutely anxious and sitting up rigidly straight, settling her legs to study him. His face was bathed in the white-blue moonlight and he seemed to be totally devoid of colour as if it had leached from him when the sun set. He had a strong, straight nose and a sharp jaw and was leanly built, like a shadow in all his black clothing. Those eyes held back unflinchingly.  
Mel looked away first, embarrassed as though he could read her mind. She had started to sweat again though the night was almost cold.  
“Um… I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to interrupt or anything.”  
“What? …oh, that. It’s nothing. Sam might thank you for it later. First game he’s won in months.” Sebastian gazed off into the lake again.  
Must’ve been the blond guy. That’s his name.  
Mel stood up on the rock and wobbled her way down, legs tired and shaking like a fawn’s. She got the sense he was done talking, and so was she.  
“I’d better get, um, going now.”  
He looked at her one last time. Mel thought suddenly that she might like to look into those eyes forever, to be really seen by them, and immediately banished the idea. He withdrew his hand from his pocket and reached a flashlight out to her. It was hefty and very warm as she took it, noticing how much smaller her cold hands seemed to be in comparison to his. He had nice hands, she thought dreamily. Skilled ones, with long fingers and bony knuckles. A musician or a writer maybe. An artsy type.  
“See you around, then.”  
Sebastian left unceremoniously before she could formulate a thank you. Mel was left staring at her feet, at the cigarette butt he’d discarded in the grass. It felt like all the blood in her body had migrated to the very surface of her skin. Her mouth was dry as sand again and she knew she had another hour’s trek through the dark forest before she could calm herself in the safety of her own home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot write lately unless i force myself, but here's the next bit anyway. for all those who leave feedback- i'll work some magic so your day will be great. any and all feedback, comments, kudos, etc is appreciated more than you know.


	5. Joke

Mel had placed the flashlight on her kitchen table, a place of honor, nearly too visible. Of everything on the scuffed little table, the dirty dishes, the unwashed sweaters, the unpacked groceries, the packets of seeds, her eyes would focus solely on it alone. It had been two full weeks since she had seen any of them, even after designating Fridays and Saturdays as strict socialization days, where she forced herself with titanic effort to wake up early, to leave her farm and speak with the townspeople.

Every time she zeroed in on that damn flashlight she would be wracked with a spike of hot embarrassment mingled with guilt, and though the feeling was not wholly unfamiliar, Mel could not bring herself to bring it back. It would be so unbearably awkward. What would he think she had been doing with it all this time? Would it be weird to make some kind of a gesture of apology? Homemade cookies? Did people do that? 

The social days exhausted her, and she took Sundays as a rest day from it all, and because of her rigid scheduling, her little patch of dirt had begun to flourish with regular attention and she was able to make shipments most days. Her back against a wall of stress, depression, and isolation, Mel had turned to her garden for relief.   
She was still living mostly paycheck to paycheck, which was a relief after bleeding money for a month, wherein she had devolved back into college life, eating ramen and toast for two weeks, but the situation had improved somewhat.  
She had ripped her jeans and stained her boots with mud and developed callus and muscle alike, which had made Lewis smile. It was the first marks of a farmer, he told her. 

Mel had taken to wandering her property regularly as a source of comfort, now that the days were fairly long, and it had truly begun to warm up. The leaves had unfurled and conspired to blot out the sun along the little trail she had unthinkingly carved, and she tended it on good days, keeping the weeds at bay and thinning some trees for lumber. She brought field guides from the library and had taken up foraging; a first client of hers, some hippy-dippy chef from the city who was invested to the point of obsession with new and unusual foods, had expressed interest in wild goods. Who was she to deny him his passion, even though it sometimes made her nervous to send them off, at once assured and absolutely uncertain about whether she had identified the plants correctly.

Often, just as afternoon melted into evening, she would pause to rest on a stump near the same path she had taken to the lake that tense, stomach-turning night. She kept the flashlight in her backpack like a close friend, meaning well every time she entered the woods; Mel had overthought the night into obscurity- she wasn’t quite sure which details she had inserted herself anymore. She tried to physically force herself to go, to set it on the step, to put it in the mailbox, anything, but the thought made her breath short and her back sweat. Next time I see him, for sure, she told herself. But she never saw Sebastian, and made sure not to seek him out. 

Mel needed to go into town that day, a Tuesday with a sky packed with cottony grey clouds, and dreaded it, saving the trip for well into the afternoon. It was only some seeds she needed, some milk and eggs, and to return the field guides to the library. To make it perhaps more bearable, or to armor herself against the townsfolk, she made up her face a bit, just the eyes and lips, and wore the lone sundress she owned; a longish light-blue linen thing picked from a bargain bin years ago that did her body as much justice as she would allow herself to concede. Mel’s pocketknife still hid in the front pouch of her backpack despite herself. 

 

In the store, holding her groceries and attempting small talk with Pierre, she caught a glimpse of Abby, a name that didn’t suit her learned secondhand from her gossipy mother. The girl caught her eye, giving her something of a smirk that Mel was unable to interpret as friendly or not, and feeling saucy, she returned it with a small wave. Mel could feel the sweat forming on her neck and she looked away, having paid. Abby emerged from the back room, short but powerful in presence compared to Mel, and she felt the hairs on the back of her neck begin to rise, her throat forming its familiar lump. 

“Hey, long time no see.” She said, not dropping the smirk. She really was tiny, Mel thought, even standing pin straight with her shoulders back next to a habitual sloucher.   
“Yeah.” Mel returned, avoiding her gaze. Abby turned her head pointedly to see whatever it was she was fixated on, and Mel cringed internally and went back to looking her in the eyes, caught.   
“Hey… do, like, maybe want to hang out with us again? Like I know you were drunk and everything but you seem pretty funny.”  
Mel was snatched from her anxiety by a wave of pure shock. Those were words that she had assumed she would never hear here. There seemed to be no malice in Abby’s narrow face, sharp though it was.   
“Um. I- Really?”   
“I mean…. It’s your choice.” Abby gave her an incredulous look. “Sam wants to see you again. He loves hearing about the city.” 

The gang (as it was termed, with affection and sarcasm) was getting together at the saloon again that Friday, and details and numbers were swapped before Mel left with her things, dumbfounded. Had that been some sort of joke? Something about it didn’t sit right, and it ate at her. 

It was dusk by the time she finished up in the library, having perused the miniscule sci-fi section and selected a battered copy of an old high-school favourite of hers, the lone second volume in a saga. She packed up after a brief conversation with the curator on getting new books in, which Mel was disappointed to learn was rare.   
The sunset was just fading as she left, and the breeze was cool against her skin, warm from the cozy library, and in the absence of people Mel decided to take a stroll around the town. She had always loved the early night. It felt like one big hiding space, close and secure and safe, with not a soul around to threaten her tenuously functional mental equilibrium. The air was scented heavily with the heady perfume of the scraggly wild lilacs partially hidden in the bush. She passed under one wandering up a dirt trail past the creepy little park, reached up, and plucked off a stem, which she positioned behind her ear. 

The moon wasn’t full but it shone with a pale light like the washed-out panel lights in the cubicle she had left behind what felt like an eternity ago and provided her enough to see by.   
She walked along the river, listening close for the bubbling of the tiny rapids, for sounds of fish breaking the surface. Mel was back at the lake before she knew it, casting the ancient and well-loved fishing rod she had received from the resident creepy, crusty fisherman. He reminded her of a Scooby-Doo villain, from the really old cartoons she had watched from her mother’s tapes as a kid.  
The line slipped smoothly into the dark water. Mel imagined she would catch some Lovecraftian sea monster; her flight of fancy was soothing. Her mind was being unusually quiet for once, and she didn’t have to fight it so hard and was endlessly thankful for it. The fetid algae smell of the lake eventually got to her, and she reeled in the line, empty, and moved to a different location. 

She could see the house in the distance, still glowing warmly and happily, probably smelling like a home-cooked dinner. Probably there was a little family gathered around the table. The image invoked in her a moment of raw sadness; it was a kind of nostalgia almost through the eyes of someone else, like something she wanted so bad but had never experienced firsthand. She contemplated the bag at her feet, the cold cabin she’d come home to, the meal she wouldn’t make. Her eyes stung and then welled with tears. She felt her control over her emotions slip a bit, felt pain she had compartmentalized begin to spill over.

Mel cast again and lowered her eyes to the water again, smoothing a hand over her frizzy hair. A familiar smell of smoke wafted over and she saw Sebastian had joined her once again in her reverie, quiet and anticlimactic in stunning comparison to her predictions. He stood a ways off and nodded in greeting. Mel attempted a shaky smile, hoping her tears weren’t obvious. She could feel her hands begin to tremble. 

This time when she felt his eyes burn into her, she was correct. The shaking got worse. He stared at her and parted his lips as if to speak but turned his head away, hesitating. Mel fiddled with her tackle, trying to stuff it into her bag. 

“Hey, you alright?” He said, still not looking at her. She took a deep breath and suddenly felt freezing cold in her dress and sandals, unprotected from him.   
“Yeah. Thanks for the flashlight the other day. It, uh, saved my ass.” She dug it from the bottom of her bad and handed it over, making sure not to accidentally touch him.   
“Don’t mention it.” Sebastian tucked it into the pocket of his hoodie. She wondered if he ever took it off, if he knew the feeling of wearing the same clothes for weeks straight, unable to function enough to do the laundry like she did. 

“Do you need to talk? You don’t look… all that okay.” He said, but looked vaguely uncomfortable at the prospect.

“I’m okay. Thanks, though.” She swiped at her traitor eyes, talking around her stuffed throat, around the wall of fear and pain that threatened to close in on her Indiana Jones-style. Mel shoved all her shit in her back and left as quickly as she was able, dreading what sort of opinion he probably had of her after that stellar drunk first impression and everything after. She followed the river instead of going through the woods, loping along at a half jog and trying not to choke on her breath.  
How the hell was she going to survive Friday at the saloon?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got drunk and wrote this chapter in one sitting and im posting it in the same sitting so there might be errors.   
> Thanks as usual for anyone stickin with me for this. All feedback treasured.

**Author's Note:**

> hey all, i'm new on the scene and would really appreciate your feedback. this is, for the most part, not at all a happy story. expect a lot of awkward scenes made worse as viewed through the anxious mind. there may or may not be a happy ending.  
> thanks for reading!


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